On May 1, 1992, two days after the Los Angeles Police who beat him were acquitted and the city was set on fire, Rodney King stood before a bank of microphones and made a statement. You remember what he said. Or, more likely, you think you remember. King said, "Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?"

King's plea for peace, as plaintive and as unaffected as it was, was instantaneous fodder for comedians. "Can we all just get along?" -- a phrase that added a word King didn't say -- became a punchline. And so, too, did Rodney King.

When Smith, acting as King, gives that May 1 statement, he brilliantly conveys the agony felt by a man who'd been watching people attack people and destroy property indiscriminately and claim they were doing it on his behalf.

"I knew that I wanted to present Rodney King's speech from May Day in its entirety," Smith said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, the city where he grew up. "Because we never hear it in its entirety. I think they probably played it live, you know, that one time, and then they started truncating it. And so, it became the punchline of a joke....

"It's a tremendous speech. I think it's one of the great American speeches. It stopped the riot. Dr. King made some good speeches, but he never stopped a riot. Rodney King did. And he could have justifiably gotten up and said, 'Hey, burn it down. Burn it down in my name.'

"And nobody could have faulted him for saying that."

Smith is a character actor who has had roles in multiple Spike Lee films, including "Do The Right Thing," "Malcolm X," "Get on The Bus" and "Chi-Raq." More recently, he had roles in "Dope" and "The Birth of a Nation" and on the locally shot television series "Queen Sugar." Between all that work for film and television, Smith has also created for the stage a number of one-man shows. Those shows have explored the lives of people from Christopher Columbus and Huey P. Newton to Frederick Douglass.

On Father's Day 2012, he was conceptualizing a show about Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank.

"I veered away from that project," Smith said, "because when I opened my laptop and saw that Rodney King had expired the way that he expired I was incredibly moved." King drowned in his pool.

"I never met him. I never saw him. Never heard him speak, but I felt when I read that news that I had lost a blood brother. And I wanted to know why I was moved. Why did I feel that way? And why, by extension, would my potential audience feel that way? I dug in."

King's inglorious death at the bottom of his pool was even more tragically poetic because he had such a love of the water. He was a surfer dude from Altadena. He swam. He water-skied. But he eventually died the same way his father had died: He got drunk and drowned.

"As with any of my work, whether it's Columbus or Huey Newton," Smith said, "I'm always asking people to reconsider history: rewind it, remix it, be able to look at a symbol as a flesh-and-blood person."

Did he ever figure out why King's death registered as such a loss?

"He's somebody that we know, man. You know him. You know that dude, right? He's real, and he never tried to be anybody but Rodney. He never tried to game us in any way. That's why that speech is so beautiful and so effective. As fractured as it was. He's drunk, and he's brain-damaged, you know? He wants to say let's try to be the change that we envision or something Obamaesque, but he can't get there. 'Cause he got a headache! But we know this cat."

Smith first performed "Rodney King" less than two months after King died. In 2017, Netflix released a Spike Lee-directed film of a Brooklyn performance.

"I had thought that my piece was going to be a memorial piece, you know, maybe for that summer," Smith said, "a little memory piece, but this thing called America kept happening. The story of Rodney King is tragically relevant."

Even though there is a recording of the performance on Netflix, Smith says, "there's something about live theater. There's something about being in that room and coming into communion with each other. And if any city understands that, I think it's New Orleans.

"It has such a great history of communal expression in which the line between so-called performer and so-called audience is completely blurred." He called the jazz funeral "the highest form of theater that we have in which the living commune with the so-called dead. And vice versa. And that, I think, in its best form, is what this play is."

Roger Guenveur Smith will have a public conversation with Jarvis DeBerry at the CAC at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 13. He will perform "Rodney King" Friday and Saturday (Sept. 14 and 15) at 7:30 at the CAC and Sunday, Sept. 16, at 3 p.m.